Re: [microsound] why electronics?

[philippe petit <philippe-petit@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> Or more specifically, applying aesthetic/sonic ideas from electronic sound
> to non-electronic instruments?

Fennesz, Kurtzmann, Oren ambarchi... and some other ones mix electronics and
real instruments...
The Spaceheads and Max Eastley just did that... Instead of giving you my biased
opinion here is :

The WIRE # 209 ? July 2001-07-05
In the 1970s, Max Eastley fixed taut strings to a resonating body and suspended
them in a stream in North Wales. The resultant sounds appeared on his side of "
New and rediscovered musical instruments " (1975), an album he shared with
David Toop. As well as this hydrophone, the album documented other creations
such as a jangling metallophone and a whirring elastic aerophone. It was
sculptor?s music, surrendering control to the natural world, allowing the
elements to call the tune. The prototype was the Aeolian harp, a wind-activated
instrumeent taken by Romantic poets to symbolise the workings of imagination.
25 years later, the title of Eastley?s collaboration with the duo Spaceheads
alludes to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with lines from " The rime of the ancient
mariner" quoted on the cover.
Here Eastley plays The Arc, a three metre long ssingle string stretched over
wood, then sounded with a bow or glass rods and electronically enhanced. The
instrument?s familiar from his " Buried Dreams " album with Toop, but it still
appears uncanny. The Spaceheads are Andy Diagraam channelling trumpet and voice
through pitchshift/harmony machines and echo loops, and Richard Harrison
drumming like a man possessed and striking sheets of metal fed through
electronics. At times the trio is churningg wash sounds oddly close to thaat
hydrophone in Llanfyllin, control surrendered at the interface with
electricity. Elsewhere, alien voices and otherworldly discussions leak through
the receptive membrane formed by the enmeshed instruments.Then Harrison and
Diagram cut to the chase, pulsing and burning like Coleridge?s daemons. It all
has a dreamlike coherence that never lapses, perhaps because the recording was
done live and in the course of a single afternoon. Or could it be that the Arc
really is a bridge to some spookier elemental domain ?
Julian Cowley